The Crowd as a biological event, what le Bon called Mental Unity, as distinct from the biological event of Alone-ness, or possibly Mental Disunity, is currently an intuitive distinction which on evidence from my own personal experience is I think a real distinction. There are things I will do and say when alone with my thoughts that I try to avoid doing or saying when in a crowd.
More recently we don't all live in the same cave, we don't keep warm by the same fire, bath in the same water, sleep in the same space, and there are billions of us not millions. I suspect that over the generations the quality of both Alone-ness and Crowd-ness has changed. A massive crowd for a hunter gatherer was probably less than a hundred people.
For John Walking Stewart the ideal of social organization was five or six family groups living in the same Longhouse. Mind you, Walking Stewart never lived in a Longhouse, he died alone on his birthday in the room he rented in Northumberland Place near what is now Trafalgar Square in London, England. In the following days his body was found by friends beside an empty bottle of laudanum. A truly enviable way to put an end to the pains of old age and sickness.
For a Trappist, a hermit, a reality is the inevitability of crowd-ness in a belief system that places value on alone-ness. For a hermit and Trappist the exercise is to maintain an intimate and wordless contact with a form that has nothing to do with crowds of people. And desperate the majority of us are to understand our belonging through the warmth and security of a majority. If a hermit might want to be invisible, not sure that a Trappist does.
In our world the grammarians have made an effigy of language. They see verbs as in the service of nouns. Like good mechanics in their fear of death or invisibility, they make up spelling tests, the subjunctive and they invent adjectives to dress the dead. I can see the back row is a basic pain, a disobedience with nothing but disobedience to offer, and how glad I am to belong to it.
"Back Row Proud."
